Autumn Vege Bag - Week 9
We keep an archive of previous vege highlights, tips and recipes in the previous weeks blog posts.
Click on any vegetable that has a link to see posts with more detailed information about it.
Click here to go to the archive and use the “filter” to bring up previous posts we’ve highlighted a vegetable for more tips, recipes and background info.
This week we have
Salad (from Ahoaho māra kai)
Potatoes (Ahoaho māra kai)
Kale or Zucchini (Ahoaho māra kai)
Carrots (Ahoaho māra kai)
Capsiscum (x2) or Tomatoes (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Chilli (medium Jalapeno or Cayenne, or HOT Habanero) or Lebanese Cucumber (Crooked Vege)
Pumpkin or squash piece (Crown, Rampicante, Butternut, Kamokamo, Burgess, Red Kuri) (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Coriander or Snake Beans (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Vege highlights, tips & recipes
Pumpkins/Squsash
We grew about 400-500 pumpkins and squash this year.
This weeks pumpkin/squash shares come from all the 2nds - these are the ones that had some skin damage, which won’t cure and will likely rot when we store them. We’ll likely have a few weeks of pumpkins/squash, while we do our best to get these un-storeable pumpkins eaten by humans rather than compost piles.
A customer at last years Matariki on Mōana market wearing a Rampicante
Thanks to the vege bag crew who helped us plant these pumpkins back in November, and harvest them last Saturday, as part of “carb club”! Ahoaho will be harvesting the rest of their spuds and kūmara today after vege bag pick up for anyone who’d like to get dirty. I’ve written a bit more about carb club at the bottom of this post, for anyone who has missed the updates.
Chillies - dealing with the heat
Like so many great vegetables, chillies evolved in south america (and are part of the same family as potatoes and tomatoes!), and the heat they produce is an evolutionary defence against animals with teeth. The spicy compound, capsaicin, is concentrated in the pith around the seeds. These toothy animals (e.g. rats) tend to not travel far from the plant they eat the fruit from, before making their deposits. Because they have teeth, they pierce through the pith and can’t handle the heat, deterring them from trying at all. Birds on the other hand, don’t. They also don’t have taste receptors for capsaicin. And of course, they fly, spreading the chilli seed far and wide!
Despite this deterrent, humans seem to love this evolutionary defence mechanism against mammals (a lot of our favourite foods are - coffee, many of the spices we eat daily, etc).
Although I personally use a couple of chillies a day in my cooking, I realise a lot of people don’t like as much heat. A few tips:
Deseed & remove the pith on chillies to lower the heat. The heat in chillies comes from capsaicin, which is concentrated around the seed. If you want to know the “taste” of a chilli without the heat, you can nibble a tiny bit off the pointed end of the chilli.
If you don’t eat a lot of spicy food, remember that chillies freeze really well. You don’t need to eat all the chillies we offer in a week, they can last through the winter. They’re extremely slow to produce, so once they stop here at Crooked Vege, it won’t be until late summer 2026 that they’re available again.
Habaneros are really hot. But this makes them really economical for adding some spice to your meals. You don’t need to use a whole chilli in a meal! Start with 1/4 of a chilli. Until you’re familiar with the heat of a chilli, I’d recommend adding conservative amounts. You can always fry a bit of chilli in oil and add it to the dish at the end to increase the spice
If you do make your meal too spicy (we’ve all done it), you can reduce the spice by adding some combination of fat (oil, butter, coconut cream, etc), sour (vinegar, lemon, tomatoes) and sweet (e.g. brown sugar), depending what makes sense for your meal. You can also just bulk the meal up.
Carb Club background
Crops like potatoes and pumpkins are so important for our winter calories, but don’t make much financial sense without industrial scale equipment (and industrial scale soil erosion, fossil fuel emissions, etc…), especially when your kaupapa is about equitable access to kai. I ran some numbers a in 2021, on the farm I used to work at. We needed to charge about $10/kg for early season potatoes, just to cover minimum wage. That was 4 years ago.
But for the sake of kai sovereignty and resilience, we think its desperately important at least some of our winter carbs to be grown in Ōtaki.
So we’ve been running a series of workshop-working bees, where we invite vege bag members to participate in the planting and harvesting. These crops are labour intensive at our relatively small, non-industrial scale. Yet because they’re relatively simple to grow, they’re also quite fun with a group of friendly folks.
So the questions and possible outcomes of “carb club” are asking are:
Question: Can we produce a significant portion of our “carb” crops (i.e. carbohydrate dense, like spuds) locally, with minimal technology and emissions, by bringing in the community?
Possible Outcome: We don’t have enough land between Crooked Vege Ōtaki and Ahoaho Māra Kai to grow enough of these crops to feed the Ōtaki Vege bag community through winter. But if this model works, could the vege bag community collectively manage (with the guidance of CV & Ahoaho) a larger piece of organic land to produce these crops?Question: Can community members who participate leave with some base-line knowledge to grow these crops?
Possible Outcome: Encouraging members to start their own “carb club” with their friends, whānau, neighbours, in their own gardens. Through carb club, we’ve produced about 2 pumpkins per m2. So maybe we can produce a lot of kai on our neighbours 30m2 lawn?
Could we use Crooked Vege and Ahoaho to give the community access to compost, seed and tipu, that is of higher quality and lower price than is available to home gardeners?
We have some learnings and tweaks to apply next year, before we really have answers to these questions - but we remain optimistic for community-sourced kai resilience.
—
Ka kite ano,
Jon
